In recent years, electronic trading systems have gained a widespread acceptance for trading items. For example, electronic trading systems have been created which facilitate the trading of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, currency, futures, or other suitable financial instruments.
Many of these electronic trading systems use a bid/offer process in which bids and offers are submitted to the systems by a passive side then those bids and offers are hit and lifted (or taken) by an aggressive side. For example, a passive trader may submit a “bid” to buy a particular number of 30 year U.S. Treasury Bonds at a given price. In response to such a bid, an aggressive trader may submit a “hit” in order to indicate a willingness to sell bonds to the first trader at the given price. Alternatively, a passive side trader may submit an “offer” to sell a particular number of the bonds at the given price, and then the aggressive side trader may submit a “lift” (or “take”) in response to the offer to indicate a willingness to buy bonds from the passive side trader at the given price. In such trading systems, the bid, the offer, the hit, and the lift (or take) may be collectively known as “orders.” Thus, when a trader submits a bit, the trader is said to be submitting an order.
In many trading systems or markets, such as the NASDAQ or NYSE, for example, trading orders may be placed by both market makers and traders, or customers. A market maker is a firm, such as a brokerage or bank, that maintains a firm bid and ask (i.e., offer) price in a given security by standing ready, willing, and able to buy or sell at publicly quoted prices (which is called making a market). These firms display bid and offer prices for specific numbers of specific securities, and if these prices are met, they will immediately buy for or sell from their own accounts. A trader, or customer, is any entity other than a market maker which submits orders to a trading system.
For a “cash” price style instrument (i.e., an instrument for which the bid price is typically numerically lower than the offer price), when the price of a newly placed (aggressive) bid is greater than the price of an existing (passive) offer, a “crossed market” is created, and the bid may be referred to as a crossing bid. Similarly, when the price of newly placed (aggressive) offer is lower than the price of an existing (passive) bid, a crossed market is also created, and the offer may be referred to as a crossing offer. In many trading systems, when a bid and an offer lock (i.e., match each other) or cross, a trade is automatically executed at the price most favorable to the aggressive (i.e., the second submitted) order. For example, if a first market maker submits a bid at a price of 15, and a second market maker submits an offer of 14, a cross market is created and a trade is executed at the price of 15, which can often be a more most favorable price for the second market maker, such as where the first market maker was about to cancel his price. These systems may operate with little or no regard to the market maker committing capital to create a two-way bid and offer market price. Such market makers may have latency in their systems which may create slightly stale markets, whereby a market maker's existing price can be traded by a new market maker price that reflects a more recent market environment. In some instances, the difference may be merely milliseconds or some other very small period of time, but in a fast moving and liquid market, market makers may experience losses due the inherent latency of the relevant system.